An email app without a subscription

If you are searching for an email app without a subscription, you have noticed what happened to the category. Shift, Wavebox, Kiwi for Gmail and Mimestream are all subscriptions. The licence you used to buy once now renews yearly, and the day you stop paying, features switch off. For something you open fifty times a day, that adds up, and it is a strange way to pay for a window onto an inbox Google or Microsoft already host for free.

Why email apps went subscription, and why we didn't

Recurring revenue is easier to run a company on, and there is nothing wrong with it for a product that costs money to operate every month. A rebuilt client that syncs your mail through its own servers has real ongoing costs. Smails has none of those. It loads Gmail's and Outlook's own web interfaces in a small native shell, your mail goes straight between your computer and the provider, and there is no server of ours in the middle. There is nothing for a subscription to pay for, so there isn't one.

What your current app costs over time

Type what you pay now and drag the slider. We have not pre-filled competitor prices because they change and we would rather you use the real number from your own receipt.

What you get for paying once

• Unlimited Gmail, Google Workspace, Outlook.com and Microsoft 365 accounts, each in its own isolated session, one click apart in a sidebar. The app we built for multiple Gmail accounts on a Mac, now on Windows too.
• The real interfaces. Nothing rebuilt, so labels, filters, search operators and shortcuts all work. That is the core difference from a rebuilt client, which the Mimestream alternative page goes into.
• Native and light. No bundled Chromium. The Shift alternative and Kiwi for Gmail alternative pages cover the apps that do bundle one or charge yearly.
• Two devices on one licence. A Mac and a PC, or two Macs. See the Gmail desktop app for Mac and Gmail desktop app for Windows pages.
• Free updates, and a full refund if it is not for you. Try it free with one account first, no card.

Who else lets you pay once

Credit where due: Orbit, a Mac-only app built on the same native-shell idea, is also a one-time purchase at $89 at the time of writing, and Mailplane was pay-once before it shut down in 2021, which is why so many of its users ended up on our Mailplane alternative page. Apple Mail and Thunderbird are free, and if a traditional unified-inbox client is what you want, they are the honest recommendation. The comparison table has every pricing model side by side.

Pricing models compared